SIMON DUFF recommends a new album from renowned composer and oud player Anour Brahem.
The Works by Paul Salveson
Significant chronicle of working-class life a flawed exercise in revisionist history
HERITAGE SITE: Horwich Works
JAMES WALSH has a great night in the company of basketball players, quantum physicists and the exquisite timing of Rosie Jones
A New Awakening: Adventures In British Jazz 1966 - 1971, G3, and Buck Owens
JAMES WALSH is moved by an exhibition of graphic art that relates horrors that would be much less immediate in other media
RON JACOBS welcomes the translation into English of an angry cry from the place they call the periphery
GUILLERMO THOMAS recommends a useful book aimed at informing activists with local examples of solidarity in action around the world
HENRY BELL is provoked by a book that looks toward, but does not fully explore the question of who gets to imagine the shapes of cities to come
THE KEY weakness of The Works lies in the all too obvious fact that it is Paul Salveson’s apologia for his journey from being a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) to a recent recipient of an MBE.
Whether by steam, diesel or green technology, he has travelled a long way from his political roots and clearly has a conscience that needs pacifying.
Though a work of fiction, within the book’s semi-autobiographical structure the author not only seeks to belittle those members of the CPGB who stood against the corrosive and ultimately failed Eurocommunist wing of the party, he also attempts to construct an alternative history of the Horwich Loco Works.
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